Get on the bus with Managing Editor Julie Campagna and Adobe® Integrated Runtime (AIR) Evangelist Ryan Stewart, and learn about the on AIR™ Bus Tour. Plus, get a glimpse of the riders and the tech gadgetry on board.

Hi, I'm Julie Campagna. I manage the Edge newsletter. Today a group of developers will be boarding this bus behind me and embarking on an 18-city road show through North America. And Ryan Stewart is here to tell us all about it. Let's go.

JULIE: So you're going to be one of the riders on this bus? You want to tell me a little bit about this bus tour?

RYAN: Yeah, we are going to 18 cities here in North America, and in fact we're even going to go into Canada a couple times. This morning we are starting the West Coast leg; then we are going to do an East Coast leg, and then we are going to do a Central leg, where we are actually ending up at Adobe MAX, our big developer designer conference in the fall. And in each one of these cities we are actually going to have sort of a mini one-day conference where we bring in developers, and people from the community who want to register and sign up, and they can come learn about AIR, take sessions about how to build AIR applications with Ajax or Flex, and all the technologies we support. Then, at night we're going to have a fun hangout time with free beer, free food, and free video games where developers from the day can hang out and chill and talk to the team and see the bus.

JULIE: Who is riding on the bus with you?

RYAN: On the Adobe side, we have got myself, Mike Downey, Mike Chambers, Daniel Dura, Kevin Hoyt, and then Kevin Lynch is going to join us in Seattle for a little bit. On the community side, we're going to have Robert Scoble on a leg of the bus. So from San Francisco to Seattle he's going to be on the bus and then Mark Piller from Midnight Coders is going to be at the Seattle and Vancouver events. Then for the whole thing we're going to have Andre Charland who's from Nitobi, a big Ajax shop, and then Lee Brimelow from Frog Design. So it should be a lot of fun. Should be interesting.

JULIE: And how did the idea of going on this bus tour come about?

RYAN: We had a big event here in San Francisco called Apollo Camp, where we invited developers in and we had a bunch of sessions, kind of like a mini one-day conference, and it was a huge success. So we decided, hey let's take this on the road and see if we can get people from all over the country to come check it out. And the bus tour was born.

JULIE: Great. How can people sign up for these sessions? Are they free, and how long do they run?

RYAN: The sessions are all free. You have to register on the website, which is onair.adobe.com. In most cities we're doing a full-day event, but in some cities we're doing only an evening event, so we'll have a smaller version of the all-day session. But all the sessions are free. So go register. You can come for whole day or the evening parts or whatever works for your schedule.

JULIE: You're going to be on this bus for months at a time. Is that going to be challenging for you?

RYAN: It will be interesting, but we've got a great group of guys and it will be a lot of fun. We're all going to be coding and we all have individual projects that we want to work on while we're on the bus. And then we have a lot of fun toys on the bus. We'll definitely be keeping busy.

JULIE: Do you think you could give us a tour of the bus?

RYAN: Yeah, absolutely. We've got the GPS unit back there. Up here we've got the webcam that's going to do all the live video feeds from the bus. Then we've got the Xbox over here with the controllers and with Guitar Hero ready to go. We've got a few copies of Adobe Master Suite Collection. Then back here we've got the command center where Mike is setting up all the applications for a live video feed, for our Flickr feed, and all that kind of stuff. Twitter from the bus. We've got a beer presence, which is always a good present. [chatter and laugher in the background] You can never have too much beer. And back here is the sleeping area. Media Temple is one of our sponsors and they gave us a cool gift basket with some slippers and a robe in it, I think. And in the back, we've got another Xbox and more Guitar Hero controllers. We'll be able to have a lot of Guitar Hero games. And then a couple laptops and monitors. We have no shortage of computers to mess with and video games to play. We've got the whole media center over here: so, a DVD player, amp, everything so you can have surround sound in the back here. And that's about it. We're getting everything loaded, all the computers set up, and we're ready to roll.

JULIE: Well, thank you for the tour. I hope you have a fantastic trip.

RYAN: Cool, thanks a lot! We'll see you guys on the road.

JULIE: All right, great! Well, if you want to catch the Adobe AIR Bus Tour, definitely go to onair.adobe.com, register for sessions, and check it out. Or if you're going to MAX 2007 in Chicago, September 29, you can see the tour there and check out Adobe Integrated Runtime for yourself. And that's it. I hope you enjoy this edition of the Edge.